Ken Burns’ documentary on “America and the Holocaust”, which is to begin broadcasting on Public Television tonight is reported to be a serious and penetrating examination of many of the fundamental questions surrounding U.S. policies and politics from the 1920’s through the Second World War. In particular, it will consider an array of issues concerning America’s policies towards the Jews seeking to immigrate to the States, those seeking to escape the Nazi death camps, and the Roosevelt Administration’s efforts to rescue the Jews.
This three-day, six-hour long broadcast undoubtedly will speak for itself as all of Burn’s documentaries have done. It no doubt will produce its array of critics as well as supporters as did, for example, the 1978 NBC television network, mini-series, docu-drama “Holocaust” and Stephen Spielberg’s 1993 movie “Schindler’s List”. According to the few fragmentary facts that have been released—and this is a critical point concerning all the opinions that have been generated about a series yet to be released--this movie will address the often discussed and never resolved questions about American policy before, during, and after the War.
Regardless of where the Burns’ movie comes out and the amount of positive or negative criticism it receives, one thing has not changed very much since the period covered by the series; antipathy towards Jews is alive, in fact, is thriving. While it might be garbed in sheep’s clothing, or may be called anti-Israel or anti-Zionism, anti-Semitism remains very present in the gutters of the world as well as in the consciousness of many of the world’s leaders.
At a just completed conference in London hosted by the newly established London Centre on Contemporary Anti-Semitism, more than 150 scholars from throughout the world assembled to consider the growing scourge of anti-Semitism, in all its ugly manifestations. Papers and panels addressed many of the key elements which have continued to plague Jews throughout history and especially in the 80 years after the Shoah. While the diversity of attacks against Jews differs in Western Europe versus Eastern Europe or in Latin America versus the United States, it remains strong and growing. In particular, there is an increased sense that in some parts of the world, there is a deceptive and dubious effort to create a distinction between attacks against Jews as opposed to those against Israel. While Americans and even many American Jews do not sense this distinction, among scholars who are studying this situation it is a palpable one.
There is an additional serious academic problem which many of those scholars seeking to raise questions about the growing presence and threat posed by anti-Semitism now face. In many public fora, scholars are finding that leading publications and academic journals are not interested in scholarship which is strictly about the problem of anti-Semitism. Many of the leading academic venues for scholarship have made it abundantly clear that anti-Semitism alone is not an appropriate field of academic inquiry. They are insisting that scholars consider anti-Semitism in the context of other areas of extremism, terrorism, White Supremacy, etc. While academic publishers are totally comfortable with separate fields of inquiry devoted to specific areas of racial extremism or all the sub-fields of sexual bias and discrimination, specific work addressing bias, prejudice, and intolerance of and against Jews must be homogenized into more comprehensive examinations.
When it comes to research and scholarship regarding Israel the opening for objective scholarship is even more narrow. Efforts to raise issues involving Jews in Israel are being reduced to assessing Israel’s treatment of Palestinians with only minimal consideration available for giving context to such discussion. Israeli Jewish scholars as well as those Jews in the Diaspora are pushed into a constant engagement of the political activities—so called Zionist colonization or alleged Israeli policies of apartheid. These are policies which most Jewish scholars reject and deny. In fact, these same scholars are equally critical of such policies, but they demand intellectual clarity and analysis be given to policies which are presented from the other side of the debate.
In this context the Burns documentary may be an appropriate time to reconsider not only questions about America during the Holocaust and how it treated the doomed six million Jews of Europe, but what is occurring today. Jews throughout the world are being marginalized. There are still many serious lessons which Burns’ documentary may succeed in awakening as well.
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